Newton's Wake

undercutting the good cause, but you’ll be showing the truth, and a truth that has to be faced. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better.’

Ben-Ami could not help but feel taken aback. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, with some restraint, ‘you should go into politics yourself.’

Kowalsky stroked his narrow beard. ‘After so long playing the villain? Now that would be unhelpful.’

Ben-Ami laughed, and the momentary tension between them dispersed. He and Kowalsky were on the same side. Unusually for people in the entertainment milieu, they supported what they called ‘the responsible elements’: the factions in Eurydicean politics who had pressed for strong defence even before any threat had been identified, and who had consistently pushed for a larger weighting in the material balances being given to space exploration, industrialisation and habitation. All the same, for his friend to consider a sort of rehabilitation of the Returners was going beyond anything they’d ever talked about even when drunk.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Kowalsky said.

They left the cafe and strolled along the crowded late-evening pavement to the nearest crossing. The rush of traffic stopped and they walked over the road to the park. Lights were coming on at knee-height along the paths, keeping the sky above the park dark. Nobody was looking at the stars. Entopters buzzed overhead, their navigation lights like fireflies.

A few hundred metres into the park the path twined around the plinth of a statue. Small spotlights in the bushes diffused a discreet glow over it. On a metre-high plinth, the statue was life-size. It showed two men, one tall, one short, clinging to each other and looking in each other’s faces with intense expressions of terror or ecstasy. The support for the whole sculpture was one leg of the tall man, who was apparently balancing on the toes of that one leg. The men might have been dancing. For all that they were shown upright, they might have been in fact lying on their sides, and the flexed foot pressed against the end of a bed. They might have been sliding down a waterchute together. All the ambiguities of the sculpture were collapsed by its popular name, ‘The Lovers.’

Kowalsky stopped in front of the statue. ‘You know who these two were?’ he asked.

‘Winter and Calder, of course,’ said Ben-Ami. He had passed the statue a thousand times. The names were on the plinth.

‘Yes, but do you know who they were?’

Ben-Ami shrugged. ‘Artists, musicians. Oh, and they were Returners. Probably died in the rebellion.’

Kowalsky looked at him sidelong, his face oddly sinister in the upwardly directed light. ‘Curious that they should be memorialised in the park, and yet so forgotten. Even their music is forgotten.’

‘If their music had anything to do with their politics, that’s not so surprising. Maybe they churned out Returner anthems.’ He laughed. ‘Not much demand for that.’

Kowalsky maintained his quizzical stare until Ben-Ami’s face responded with a broad grin of sudden illumination.

‘Ah!’ said Ben-Ami. He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘I must go back to my studio. Now.’

Ben-Ami’s studio was where he lived. It occupied a large part of the tenth floor of a building overlooking the park. The lights came on as he stepped through the door. He threaded his way through the clutter from past productions—a foliage-camouflaged armoured car from Macbeth, the balcony and antiaircraft gun from Romeo and Juliet, the fallout shelter from West Side Story—and sat down in front of a big wooden desk, which had a tiltable screen like a dressing-table mirror. Ben-Ami swung the keypad out and entered a few commands. The mirror’s surface gloss dissolved into a search pattern.

The available information about James Winter and Alan Calder was more comprehensive than he had expected. They were in the archives themselves, albeit on the proscribed list. It was not even true that their music was forgotten. Among Eurydice’s billion inhabitants they had thousands of fans, and their music was played publicly in hundreds of small venues. Their lyrics were, if anything, worse than most of what he’d received and discarded, but their very crudity and naivety gave them a curious power, which their music and harsh ancient voices enhanced. Ben-Ami sat up long that night. In the morning, he rose from a four-poster bed that had featured in his Shakespearean pastiche Leonid Brezhnev and called his technical adviser with a query.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ Andrea Al-Khayed asked. She looked as if she was not properly awake. Someone was asleep beside her.

Ben-Ami waved his hands excitedly. ‘It would be a coup. A unique attraction. All we have to do is get them off the proscribed list.’

Al-Khayed frowned. ‘That could be difficult. They were Returners, after all.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ben-Ami. ‘But you know what the Government is like. They’re nothing if not philistine. As long as the candidate wasn’t military or political they’re not bothered. What puzzles me is why it hasn’t been done already. They have enough fans to afford it.’

Al-Khayed looked cynical. ‘Doesn’t surprise me at all. Fans will be split into rivalrous little cliques and clubs, and in any case, the last thing people who like old music want is for their heroes to turn up and make new music.’

‘Hah-ha, very good. I’m not so sure about that. But assuming we can swing it, could we afford the resurrection?’

‘Sure. We’d have to clear it with the copyright holders, of course.’ She tabbed to something out of camera. ‘Best nailed before we put in the request, to keep the price down. Insurance … yes, we have that covered.’

‘What about the technical side?’

‘Don’t you still have the resurrection tanks from Herbert West—Reanimator?’

‘Let me see.’ Ben-Ami stood up and padded through the studio. ‘Oh, so I do. There they are.’ Under dustcovers, which when removed made him cough. He scratched his head and tugged at the cord of his dressing- gown and looked sharply over at the coffee-machine, which began gurgling in response. He hadn’t, he realised, been properly awake himself. ‘You’re telling me these were functional?’

‘Of course they were,’ said Al-Khayed, popping up on a screen in a corner. ‘Created quite a frisson at the time, having real deaths on stage. Don’t you remember?’

‘It was fifty years ago,’ complained Ben-Ami.

M

achine emotions are usually less intense than those of animals. Machines have no need for an autonomous nervous system to over-ride the hesitations of the conscious mind, for their conscious minds have no such hesitations. They need no fear to make them flee, no pain to make them desist from damage, no lust to make them reproduce. What they feel in the negative is akin to the niggle of an uncompleted task, of a shoelace coming untied, of something just on the tip of your tongue. (That last is what running a search algorithm feels like, before it completes.) Their positive urges are like the cold, clear joys of pulling an all-nighter on a big project in the sandy- eyed lucidity of amphetamines and caffeine; only without the adrenaline. Machines are cool.

The Hungry Dragon was in agony. Ever since it had been corrupted, it had found its actions at variance with its intentions, and this was not something it had ever experienced before. The experience was not one it had been designed to deal with, and the torment it suffered was not something that it had been designed to endure. (Or, if it had, it was the cruelest of its designers’ fallbacks, the fire behind all its firewalls.) It hung like a great helpless butterfly in a slow orbit about the asteroid, while below it on the surface its subverted agents worked like a beehive that made nothing sweet. Information still poured in from across the system, but nothing not controlled by the alien intelligence went out.

Machine self-consciousness, too, is not like human consciousness. It has no unconscious. In principle, everything going on within the machine is open to its inspection. Now, the Hungry Dragon was faced with the uncomfortable self-knowledge that a part of its own mind was beyond its ken. At first it had no images for its plight, but with time and experience the analogies to black, blank walls and to areas where its cameras had been blinded began to form in the regions of its mind where visual imagery was processed.

The one relief in its situation was that its within-ship processes had not been tampered with. It could still